Bob Bordone

Well, we were very fortunate.

I mean, we basically were friends, but part of that friendship, I think, emerged from work that I do around conflict issues in the mass general system.

And then just kind of the kind of larger, bigger mass general Harvard community.

And yeah, so this began really as a friendship where we were each swimming in very different waters.

But then as we would start to talk,

We realized there was a lot of kind of connection and maybe the possibility to bring two different disciplines together in a way that might be practically useful and make an impact.

And even when we started writing this, which was during COVID, what seemed to be some pretty polarizing times that were unlikely to resolve by the time the book would come out.

Yeah, and I would say, you know, I was starting to write about my first kind of piece on this topic where I used the word conflict resilience was in 2018.

And it really came from an observed dynamic that I was seeing in my teaching of Harvard Law School students.

I was on the admissions committee.

I'd been on the admissions committee for many years.

I knew that we worked very hard and were quite successful, in fact, at bringing together a very diverse student body, including politically.

And people sometimes maybe think of elite law schools as being very progressive.

But Harvard Law School, the biggest student organization, is actually the Federalists, which is the conservative students.

And despite that effort, what I noticed in the classroom was

was a reduction in conversation, diversity of viewpoint across the board.

Interesting classrooms became boring.

And even though I was teaching around conflict and negotiation and difficult conversations, I would read in students' journals things like, I want to avoid conflict, or I don't want to get into it.

And so it occurred to me that quite a part, as Joelle said, from any skills

If we don't develop this capacity to sit with disagreement, then we will never get to problem solving.